Managers-Net

Internet & Web Sites

Overview

The rapidly expanding vehicle for communication and e-commerce.
Most large and many small businesses in the whole world now
have their own web page (www.???.com or www.???.co.uk etc) but
statistics show the States and Sweden as the most prolific
users, with males heavier users than females.

Site offering

Starting with a static site to display traditional communication
information about the company - address, telephone, fax and hopefully
e-mail address plus brief company overview and details of product
portfolio, many are now expanding to include fledgling or full
scale e-commerce offerings to enable order, purchase and distribution
via the internet, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In many cases
this enables a much reduced cost of operation and therefore the
potential for favourable customer price offers. Amazon.com
were one of the first and most notable of the e-commerce (sometimes
referred to as e-business) companies, operating entirely via
the internet. They are worth a look if you are not familiar with
them. Other companies may use e-commerce as an additional channel
to their more traditional offerings (i.e. stores, catalogue).

Site development

There are now many site authoring tools available, such as
Pagemill (one of the first), Dreamweaver (Adobe), Net Objects Fusion,
Frontpage (Microsoft Office FrontPage), which enable
rapid development, allowing incorporation of text, audio, graphics
and video. Indeed sites such as the BBC
offer real time video, which basically means streaming at an
acceptable frame rate across the net, and many radio stations
offer real time audio. These tools avoid the developers, if
they wish, from using raw HTML (hyper text markup language) although
some understanding can help improve performance, layout etc.

There are also many service sites on the web offering templates,
buttons, graphics, backgrounds etc, to aid in site production.

Methodologies for site construction, to my knowledge, are not
much in evidence. There are mechanisms for rapidly altering the
look and feel of your site. The cascading style sheet (CSS) is
one of these.

Programming applets can be used in Java and other languages.
VRML can be used for 3D modelling and interactive worlds. MP3
music can be incorporated

This site has been developed using raw HTML, "the living standard" and CSS.

Registering the site

There is a need to globally register the address of one's
site. In many cases this is free, in others there is a small
fee for registration / server space This is achieved via either
going directly to the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Baidu
etc) or someone who will register for you i.e
Dreamhost.

Clearly many of the blue chip names have already been taken,
indeed there has been a case for speculators registering recognised
names and then selling those onto blue chip companies.

Hosting the site

Initial setup would probably be via a local service provider
(Compuserve, AOL, Demon etc) to allow final user testing. Many
of these organisations allow up to 15MB server space free. The
site after registration is then moved to a recognised organisation
which hosts web sites.